Food History

I forgot to say that you can buy salt bush and sea parsley here. I asked and they have designed their packets specifically for posting overseas, so be daring and give them a try.

Sea parsley is apparently a must-have herb for fish eaters, but my heart is set on salt bush. This might have something to do with the fact that I have an acute fish allergy. It has equally as much to do with cooking with salt bush being one of my childhood dreams.

Since each and every way I turn right now I find bushfoods, I thought I should inflict the same thing on you. Not that it’s an affliction for me, since I have packets of herbs and spices, ready to cook, but for you, you get to hear anecdotes and then decide whether or not you want to cook with the ingredients or contemplate their history or ignore my post and hope for maybe a decent historical biscuit recipe tomorrow, to make up.

I’ve chosen just two herbs to introduce you to today. There’s a reason for this. Popular lore has it that the early British settlers used tea tree when there was no tea to be had. Apart from this and some rather good stories about native animals from a slightly later period (which I need to check up, since I suspect I’m teaching Colonial Australian food in a few weeks) the general feeling about Australian native ingredients is that we’ve ignored the bush and ignored the foods of indigenous Australia until very, very recently.

This turns out to be only half true. The early settlers used herbs like salt bush (Atriplex nummularia) and sea parsley (Apium prostratum) and then later settlers replaced salt bush with rosemary and sea parsley with common parsley. These two herbs are in front of me now, since they were part of my swag from the Show.

Maybe the move away from local ingredients and to European plants was due to homesickness. Maybe it was a distrust of the strange environment they now lived in. Maybe it was linked to the change in attitudes towards the original inhabitants of this land: the first settlers accepted that they were invading and their leaders tried to respect at least some of the indigenous rights; later settlers developed an acceptance of the concept of Terra Nullius and denied people a depressing number of human rights.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for evidence of the two shifts and see if I can work out if they happened at the same time or were linked in any way. If I find anything, I’ll let you know. I won’t have time to actively research it, though, so it may take a while before I can piece out a pattern.

Watch this space.

Once upon a time (which means over a week ago), I wrote a post about a special revolution happening with Australian food. I alerted you all to the history-in-the-making that is our bushfood industry.

My timing was totally impeccable, because when I went to the Show I found all the ingredients I had hoped were about to hit the market. The ones I had been dreaming of cooking with, less than two weeks earlier. What’s more, I got to talk to Jill and Denis Richardson, the couple responsible for making these ingredients available.

It gave me a small but important dynamic in how this bushfood revolution is happening.

They’ve realised that the problem with Australians enjoying bushfoods in the past wasn’t just being able to obtain ingredients easily and inexpensively, but the lack of recipes to go with them. Each and every packet of spices and seasoning mixes that A Taste of the Bush sells has a recipe with it. If you want more recipes, then the company sells inexpensive cookbooks. They also promote other people in the industry. Our conversation turned to luminaries such as Ian Hemphill and I began to get an inkling of just how tight the bushfoods industry is and how everyone has to work together if these foods are going to be fully integrated into Australian cooking. Jill also knows a fair amount about what local herbs early settlers used before they established their English-style gardens.

This was quite an amazing experience for a Medievalist. One of the things I look for when I research is cultural dynamics. My key area is how things change and why things change and whether participants are conscious of the change they’re provoking. To be in the middle of a change and to talk to change agents then to suddenly realise that I’m becoming a minor change agent myself in this area puts an entirely different spin on the limits of using written sources when the writers are dead, which is what most historians do.

My biggest realisation is that widespread cultural change can come from one very dynamic but rather small source, if it’s influential enough and consistent enough. This makes sense of the whole rise of Arthurian literature in Western Europe. There was probably a small but consistent group of writers linked to just a very few courts, and they changed the world of our imagination for centuries.

I need to think about this a great deal more. My other history has fed into my understanding and interpretation of food history a great deal, but this is the first time things have gone the other way. I need to think about how to identify those dynamic forces a bit further and what other causes of widespread changes may exist.

I have no doubt I’ll get back to this, but in the meantime, I’ll enjoy cooking and teaching with my bushfoods.

The greatest treasure in my nine wonderful new sachets is salt bush. Salt bush lamb has been on my secret cooking agenda since I was about thirteen. No-one I went camping with could identify salt bush for me, which was a source of constant annoyance. Now I can make my salt bush lamb.

Life is happy. My brain is occupied with interesting thoughts about the dynamics of cultural heritage and next time I go shopping for meat, lamb is on the menu.

And now let’s find out what our esteemed writers say about wheat and wheat cookery during wartime. (more…)

Today and tomorrow are two parts of the same post. I was entirely fascinated by this particular book and thought you might be, too, but I wanted to give you a decent excerpt.

Writing during wartime (even at the tail end or just after – in the case of today’s book, obviously the preparation was done during the war) has a different feel to other writing. A country’s consciousness can change or there might be some restricted ingredients.

There have been many studies of this as regards to World War II, but very few relatively of how World War I affected the US. Published in 1918, C Houston and Alberta M Goudiss’ Foods that will Win the War and How to Cook Them is a lovely source for such a study.

The introductory bits are full of laudable intentions and how to translate those into changed eating habits. These days changes to eating habits are often about us and our health, sometimes about our carbon footprint, and very seldom how we can meet the nation’s military needs.

I’ve put it behind a cut, simply because (even cut in half) it’s long. I strongly recommend it as fascinating reading. The advice on breadmaking is particularly interesting. (I wish I knew why my writing was so formal today!)

FOREWORD (more…)

Today was market day again and the change of seasons is already obvious. The colours of the fresh fruit and vegetables are at their brightest and most varied, but the peaches are getting fewer and the apples more numerous. Young leeks reminded me that winter means hot soups, and both my friend and I dreamed of sweating leek in butter. In my mind I added chestnut and cream. Fortunately I looked at my waistline before I bought the leeks: there will be plenty of time for wintry goodness.

It’s natural that the change of colours on the market stalls make me think of the calendar. More specifically, it makes me think of the Medieval calendar, where the march of the seasons was associated with specific cooking tasks.

From the beginning of autumn, farmers and estate manger would start their series of tasks to prepare for winter. I never remember the precise order of the tasks, because I don’t have to. All I have to do is haul out any copy of a late Medieval illuminated Book of Hours and it tells me what happened and when. There’s so much about food in these pictures: pigs fattening for later slaughter, harvest, preserving autumn crops, preserving meat, getting the fields ready for winter and getting the garden ready, too. That’s what my memory tells me.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable, however. One of the best Books of Hours of all is Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. I teach with it and it comes with its own bookmark, Richard III’s signature embroidered onto gauze ribbon by my remarkable accountant. Let me see what its pictures tell me about food-related activity from September. (I know it’s February, but the weather is already telling me it’s March, and in Northern hemisphere terms, that’s September. If you think that’s bad, you should come and visit during January, when it’s stiflingly hot. )

Aha! September was grape harvest (remember, Books of Hours are as regional as their artists and owners) and we have a lovely picture of the vineyard at Saumur. In the background is the castle, but, more importantly, the kitchen.

I was wrong about harvest, at least as far as this book goes, because in October there is sowing on the Seine, right near the Louvre, in fact. The birds are eating the corn s quickly as the sower can spread it, too, despite the scarecrow’s daunting bow.

November fits my stray memories. The pigs are in the forest, fattening nicely on the acorns the peasants knock off the trees.

And that’s autumn in one particularly expensive book of hours. Not even the super rich and amazingly cosmopolitan were unaware of food production. This makes me wonder about our own rich and mighty. Would they know that the colour change on the market stalls is maybe a couple of weeks early? Would they even know that the colours change?

My world is suddenly crystal clear. This makes me think about the appearance of food.

The fact that my world is suddenly crystal clear because my eye person says I must wear reading glasses to use the computer rather than normal glasses is irrelevant. It’s a pain, because I can no longer just swivel to catch something on TV – I have to swivel and change glasses. This means it’s easier to dream about the look of food rather than to turn round and watch TV. Is this a good thing? Aren’t I already just a tad too obsessed with food?

What sort of things am I dreaming about instead of checking the news headlines? I’m thinking that upper class English food in the fourteenth century probably looked just a tad cooler than a lot of upper class French food. The recipes we have focus just that much more on the looks of the food in the English recipes, you see. Parsley was used to give a fresh green look, and saunders* to enrich the colour of meat stews.

I was thinking about the effect of the work of rabid gardeners like John Evelyn on the look of a dinner. He loved herbs and fresh vegetables. One day I’m going to investigate just how long it took before the looks of salad greens started to change the looks of the dinner table. By Jane Austen’s time it definitely did: the main course was just not complete in the south of England without a salad .

I’m curious about the change of generations. What did the older generation think of when ten dishes on a table was replaced by lots of little bits of things delivered to a diner’s place? Did they feel underfed? Did their eyes miss the laden board?

My idea of a good meal changed when I stayed with close friends in Japan, many years ago. They taught me that the eyes eat just as much as the stomach. I feel far more full with a small meal where my eyes are satisfied than with a big meal where they aren’t. I blame Kazuko and Yukiko for this. If any of them want the thousand and one meals owing to them for teaching me this important truth (and saving me from being obese, to boot) I would be immensely happy if they got in touch. That’s the other thing that clear vision does: it makes me miss the friends I saw last time I could see this clearly (or was that the time before? I grow old, I grow old – so old I quote TS Eliot in a food history blog!).

Tomorrow I may give you some more biscuit recipes. One can never have too many historical biscuit recipes.

* related to sandalwood, but a richer redder colour, and much easier on the digestion.

Today I want to look at food history from a slightly different angle to usual. Mostly I look at the past. That’s what history is, after all. Occasionally I link in with the present and give you surveys of markets and food fairs and try to show how what we eat fits in with out food history. Today I want to show you how some groups work actively to change the way we see our food and change the food we eat. By changing our foodways, the food history that some future historian will find, is changed.

Today I’m fascinated by how much of the food we eat was first accepted in Europe and then made its way to our plates. The US does better than Australia in this regard. Turkey and corn are far more acceptable food than kangaroo and bush tomato.

There is an active push by researchers and government and producers to change this in Australia. Fifty years ago only about five non-indigenous Australians even knew what bush tomato was, and tourists were unwilling to even think about roo on the menu. “You can’t eat Skippy,” visitors told me when I was a child.

This page has a good overview of what’s happening to change things as does this. Some of the native species have already made it into common food in Australia – lemon myrtle and wattleseed are two of these. Others are on their way. I can’t wait for the day when I can buy finger limes at my local grocer or my farmers’ market. I’m very impatient for the day when bush tomato has more predictable crop cycles (until recently it was all wild harvested, and it’s still an unpredictable buy – which is a pain in midwinter when I crave roast potatoes with butter and bush tomato).

It’s only a matter of time before Australians incorporate more bushfood into our diet. This isn’t a chance happening, however. There are a lot of people working very hard behind the scenes to make Australians aware that European tastes are not the only ones and that an environment that’s harsh for wheat or mint may be entirely perfect for quandong or aniseed myrtle. And that’s what food history is all about. Finding changes and watching them and – when they’re happening before your eyes – being astonished at amazing new directions.

Between storms and other sundries, today hasn’t been a day where much has happened on the food history front at my place. Well, except for cool announcements about radio interviews. There was a flurry of phone calls over that one. One from the radio station to me and then one from the university to make sure I got the message. A small flurry. Or maybe it was just that I was flurried on the phone.

What I have up my sleeve (and have had for a long while but keep finding other topics I need to post about) is a bunch of fascinating websites with more information about aspects of food history than you can shake a whatever at. I’m not sure what you should shake at websites. Pastry brushes, maybe?

Today’s is a kind of advertorial site. It’s three extra words from a book of food definitions. Why I like it, is that one of those words is myrrh and another is spikenard. I have a particular soft spot for myrrh and spikenard (beyond the obvious – that I can spell them). Spikenard is an ingredient in my favourite recipe for hypocras and both it and myrrh smell rather gorgeous in perfume.

I didn’t know that spikenard was native to the Himalayas. If you look at Dalby’s article on it (on the webpage I linked to a moment ago) you will find that it’s carried in bales. This, also, I didn’t know, but it makes so much sense. It’s a very grassy stuff, spikenard.

Myrrh isn’t grassy. In fact, it’s resin from a tree. It looks a bit like a rock, but when you hold it in your palm and warm it, it gives forth its scent and you realise just how unlike amber it is. Or isn’t. Amber is, after all, fossilised resin. Which makes me wonder. If we found fossilized myrrh with a mosquito that had just dined on dinosaur blood, could Jurasic Park be remade with fragrant dinosaurs? (I think that last joke meant that the storms have officially melted my brain.)

Today you get a picture of my lunch. Kate and I shared a cheese from Milawa. It was a fine goat’s cheese, called Affine (does it count as a pun if you say similar things in two different languages?).

This is one of the cheeses I bought when Sharyn whisked me away from my retreat on Monday afternoon. We went to the Milawa Cheese Factory>, where I tasted over twenty cheeses. Not a bad one among them and the best were as good as anything I’ve tasted anywhere.

The factory isn’t that old (established 1988 according to the website) but they do use traditional methods, and it definitely shows. Please note that I said ‘traditional,’ not ‘old.’ (more…)

(I’m claiming quite a large area as my hometown. Deal with it.)

Sharyn Lilley here again, taking a break from Eneit Press, to annoy … er, that would be share, more recipes and history from ‘my home town’ with Gillian’s readers. I grew up in North East Victoria, nicely situated between the Rutherglen wineries, The King Valley winery and gourmet food region, the Murray River, and the High Country. I claim them all as ‘home’. The Aurealis Awards short-list has been posted here. Huge congratulations to those who have made the short list, there has been some fantastic speculative fiction put out this year. For those who didn’t make it through I’m sharing one of my favourite comfort food recipes. Normally this would mean chocolate, today’s recipe, however, is pumpkin soup. And for pumpkin soup, you need honey! (more…)

This is one of my special posts for January. Flick has written to tell us how foodways wove into her research for the first volume of the Janna Mysteries. She has also kindly donated a copy of the new edition, which has both the first and second volume. In February we might have a competition or a draw or something to find the new owner of this terrific volume.

I was her historical consultant and it is such a joy to work with a good writer who listens so carefully. I adore getting a new draft of her latest Janna book in the mail. I get to comment on Flick’s manuscripts and explain why this won’t work or that won’t work historically, then Flick goes back and sorts out how she can improve the history without talking away from the story or the characters. Often she finds a way of improving everything at once.

This post gives you an insight into how she works and how a bit of foodways can really make a difference to a novel.

“A difficulty arose while I was writing Rue for Repentance, Book 2 of my medieval crime series for teenagers titled The Janna Mysteries. In this novel, Janna is on the run and hides out in a forest. How is she to survive?

This is an example of how my writing angels ‘look after me’ when I most need information. One thing I used to do (until I discovered it was illegal!) was to pick wildflowers on my walks during my research trips in England. I’d been tramping the downs & forest all morning and, tired, hungry and thirsty, I lobbed into one of those delightful English pubs for lunch and a refreshing ale. While I was waiting, I pulled out my wilting flowers and whatnots, and my reference guide to wildflowers in the UK, and set about trying to find out what they were (and if anything was edible!)

The chef wandered out and gave me what for (that’s when I discovered that picking stuff is illegal.) When I explained it wasn’t just wanton destruction and that I had a good reason for it, he darted back to his kitchen and then presented me with a wonderful publication that was the answer to all my prayers and my problems. It’s a Collins gem called Food for Free, subtitled ‘a fantastic feast of plants and folklore’ and it’s written by Richard Mabey.

It’s divided into four sections (after an introduction): plants & trees; fungi; seaweeds and shellfish. A handy calendar at the beginning of the book lists what’s available in which months, while a list of recipes at the end promises such delights as dandelion leaf salad, elderflower fritters or cordial; fried puffball steaks, sloe gin, nettle haggis … and the list goes on.

I discovered that young hawthorn leaves are commonly referred to as ‘bread and cheese’, being such a staple in the country, while stinging nettles can be made into a soup or pureed as well as being mixed with bacon and oatmeal for a haggis. The elder is another bountiful plant with medicinal as well as culinary qualities. Elderflowers ‘taste as frothy as a glass of icecream soda’ eaten straight from the tree, and the berries are used in pies and jellies.

There are also little historical nuggets of info; apparently the seeds of ‘fat hen’ formed part of the last ritual gruel fed to the 2,4000 year old ‘Tolland Man’ whose perfectly preserved corpse was recovered from a bog in Jutland, Denmark in 1950. The leaves of fat hen can be eaten raw or cooked like spinach.

The section on fungi is very detailed, with clear instructions for picking and preparation, and also for telling the difference between the edible and poisonous. (DId you know that there are 3000 species of large-bodied fungi growing in the UK and only about 20 are seriously poisonous?)

As Janna was nowhere near the sea, I didn’t have to address seaweeds (YUK!) or shellfish (YUM!) but there was plenty in the first two sections to keep her alive in the forest for a very long time.
(What a great book to take on a camping trip in England!) ”

Felicity Pulman

PS from Gillian - the picture above ought to link to where you can buy it, since not all of you are near bookshops that sell Australian books.

PPS from Gillian. More about me and historical fiction here (but only sometimes). More about books here (all the time!). The New Year makes me feel just exceptionally helpful.

You don’t have nearly enough cookie recipes yet. I’m assuming this because all my friends who do that mysterious and little-known festival called Christmas are baking and baking and baking. Slices and biscuits and every kind of cake, as well as identifiable recipes such as plum pudding and Christmas cake.

Me? I’m taking pasta with avocado and macadamia cream sauce (maybe also artichokes in the sauce – I need to think about this) to Christmas lunch at a friends, and that’s really all the cooking I have to do.

Today’s recipes are from 1845, (more…)

So, what are the new ingedients that people fried with, and why am I so excited? (it’s my second post today and I’m excited - that says a lot)

In older cookbooks the raising agent is yeast or other substances (I’ll introduce you to the other substances one day, I promise - they’re fascinating). Today I’m introducing you to that extraordinary new stuff, baking powder.

It really is surprisingly recent and it has definitely changed the taste of our food and how we cook. I ought to do a special post about it one day. Too much food history and only 24 hours in a day: that’s my problem.

Baking powder had really good advertising. Tonight’s recipes come from The New Dr. Price Cook Book for use with Dr. Price’s phosphate baking powder, Chicago, Royal Baking Powder Co. 1921, and gives you a bit of the newness, the advertorialness and just how recently it came into our lives. Actually, Dr Price’s book is a bit deceptive, as you’ll see by the second book from tonight. Baking powder was in common use by World War I. This gives you the real Educational Stuff - never trust one source! (more…)

For a different type of fried food, let’s look at Cassell’s Vegetarian Cookery. A manual of cheap and wholesome diet. It was written by A.G. Payne and was published in 1891. It’s very much a book of the Commonwealth, rather than the US. There are some major differences in ingredients (oil instead of animal fat for frying, for instance – the simple response to this is “But it’s a vegetarian cookbook”. The thing is, though, that I’ve seen US vegetarian recipes from the same period that still use animal fat) and Payne is very full of explanations that tell us exactly how innovations affect recipes (the general techniques for sweet fritters says it all).

I’m so fascinated by the US/UK differences that I think I might do another post today, just so that you can see US and UK nineteenth century recipes back to back, and draw your own conclusions.

Piroski Sernikis (more…)